Barbara Chase-Riboud

Barbara Chase-Riboud (b. 1939) is an American sculptor and writer whose work, spanning sculpture, drawing, poetry, and historical fiction, has established her as a pioneering figure in 20th- and 21st-century art. Her practice developed within the postwar Paris art scene, where she settled in 1961 after completing her studies at Yale.

Born in Philadelphia, she received early artistic training at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and later at Temple University before continuing her education at Yale, where she was among the first Black women to receive an MFA. Her sculptural practice emerged from early experiments with bronze casting during her fellowship at the American Academy in Rome in 1957, where she developed a distinctive variation of the lost-wax technique.

Chase-Riboud’s work is deeply informed by transnational experience. Living and working between Paris and Rome, and traveling across Europe, Africa, and Asia, she developed a practice engaged with questions of history, identity, and cultural memory. Her sculptures and writings frequently address figures and narratives marginalized by dominant histories, including works such as the Malcolm X Steles and Cleopatra’s Marriage Contract (1973).

Shortly after her arrival in Paris, she married the photographer Marc Riboud. Through this relationship, she became integrated into a transnational artistic network spanning earlier avant-garde figures and contemporary practitioners. She was introduced to artists including Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, Victor Brauner, Man Ray, Alberto Giacometti, and Max Ernst. She was also closely associated with the African American artistic community in postwar Paris, including Herbert Gentry and Beauford Delaney.

Her first solo exhibition in Paris took place in 1966 at le cadran solaire, a gallery associated with Surrealist artists and named after a sundial created by Dalí. The last showed in Salon de Mai in 1961.

Chase-Riboud’s practice reflects a transnational approach to modernism, shaped by her position within interconnected artistic, literary, and publishing networks spanning Paris and the United States.